Links

Some links to especially nice things.

Ken Thompson Hack:
Ken Thompson wrote the original Unix. In his speech “Reflections on trusting trust” after receiving the ACM Turing award he tells the following story: (1) he changed the C compiler so it would, when compiling the login command, add code that allowed a certain password to be accepted. (2) He added more code to the C compiler to detect when it itself was compiled and add both the login-altering and self-compile-detecting code. (3) He removed both pieces of code from the source, knowing the compiler will re-introduce them every time it compiles their sources. Pure magic.